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Shakespeare on Palestine on Fox News

Here’s a totally unreadable piece on the Fox News web site by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center published in the runup to Mahmoud Abbas’ speech at the United Nations. Cooper recycles all the old cliches – “backed by Iran,” “they teach their children to hate,” etc. As though it were a matter of Palestinians recognizing Israelis’ rights! Of course no such screed would be complete without an appeal to Shakespeare (the only universally agreed-upon scripture we’ve got on this planet) to buttress the opinionator’s authority. In this case, he invokes both Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

In Shakespeare’s words, “The fault lies not in our stars, but ourselves.” The Palestinians might as well be relying on astrology rather than looking in their cracked national mirror.

Despite their attempted charade at “unity” by Fatah and the Hamas a few months ago, the Palestinians (like Hamlet) are fatally unable to make up their minds. There are two Palestinian presidents, two prime ministers, and a legislature that neither meets nor passes laws.

As it happens, the context is interesting. Julius Caesar and Hamlet were written one after the other, and what is striking (as I learned from David Bromwich in his excellent Yale seminar on “Political Shakespeare”) is the similarity between the two plays. The sulky insurgents Brutus and Hamlet, at varying speeds, both “make up their minds” to – hello, Rabbi Cooper! – take up arms against a corrupt, unaccountable, increasingly arrogant autocrat. Here’s the speech spoken by Cassius in Julius Caesar1.2:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonourable graves.Men at some time are masters of their fates:The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Both plays, alas, end with the death of the hero and various other corpses littering the stage as well. So I’m not endorsing that approach. I just want to point out that the general intellectual laziness of rote-Zionist discourse extends to its sloppy citation of Shakespeare.